Online rumors are swirling that China’s vice minister of State Security, Dong Jingwei defected to the United States in mid-February with his daughter. The internet speculation comes from “Chinese-language anti-communist media and Twitter” reports The Daily Beast.
Allegedly Jingwei gave the United States information about the Wuhan Institute of Virology “that changed the stance of the Biden Administration concerning the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.” Dong has been a longtime official in China’s Ministry of State Security, known as Guoanbu.
If he did indeed defect, Dong would be the highest-level defector in the history of the People’s Republic of China. Dong’s publicly available background states he is “responsible for the Ministry’s counterintelligence efforts in China, i.e., spy-catching, since being promoted to vice minister in April 2018” according to the Daily Beast.
Without naming Dong directly, Red State reported on June 4th that a high-level defection from China occurred, saying the Defense Intelligence Agency received information from him that Beijing is covering up biological warfare research at the Wuhan lab.
Red State reported: “Sources say the level of confidence in the defector’s information is what has led to a sudden crisis of confidence in Dr. Anthony Fauci, adding that U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) personnel detailed to DIA have corroborated very technical details of information provided by the defector.”
The chinese-language press also has suggested Dong’s daughter Yang also defected with him. Yang is allegedly the former spouse of a senior executive of the company Alibaba who heads TMall, China’s enormous company similar to Amazon.
The Daily Beast reports:
Dong’s defection was raised by Chinese officials last March at the Sino-American summit in Alaska, according to Dr. Han Lianchao, a former Chinese foreign ministry official, before defecting after the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. In a Wednesday tweet, Han, citing an unnamed source, alleged that China’s foreign minister Wang Yi and Communist Party foreign affairs boss Yang Jiechi demanded that the Americans return Dong, and U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken refused.
Former Pentagon, State Department and CIA expert Nicholas Eftimiades, author of Chinese Espionage: Operations and Tactics, called the report “exactly what it is, a rumor. It happens all the time” in information warfare between Beijing and anti-communist overseas Chinese. But he called Dr. Han, a pro-democracy activist with the Washington, D.C.-based Citizen Power Initiative for China group, “a straight shooter, not known to exaggerate in any way or form… trusted for his integrity.”